Amending parent-child relationships is seriously non-intuitive (and that is putting it mildly)
When a child is attached in the family tree to the wrong parents:
- you open the child's person page
- replace one of the parents with the actual parent
- would move on to replace the other parent (expecting it, after that step, to end up in his/her proper place)
- but realize that now ALL children of the first couple have been assigned to a mongrel couple of one parent from one marriage and another parent from the other marriage
To me, it seems that correcting erroneously attached children is a non-intuitive (poorly designed) process where the possibility of messing up is rather high.
Basically, when you expect one person to be relocated, instead, everyone else gets relocated around that person.
But perhaps I am too dumb, so could someone please explain me how to do it properly? Thank you.
Answers
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Yes. It is confusing and I have to remind myself what I am doing each time.
On the child's detail page in the Family Members section you have two different edit relationship icons which have different functions:
There is the one next to the marriage event. This is to edit the Couple relationship. Click on it to come to this pop up:
Notice there are no children shown here. In this pop up, you can remove or replace the husband or wife in the couple. This also removes or replaces that person in every child-parent relationship this couple has. In other words, although it says you are editing the couple, you are editing the entire family. If you remove one of the couple, you are removing that person from the entire family.
This other one is next to the children's names. This is to edit a single Child-Parent relationship. Click it to come this this pop up:
Here you see the couple and one child. You have three choices. Remove or replace the father, the mother, or the child. Choosing any of these affects only the child-parent relationship for that one child. It does not affect the couple relationship or the child-parent relationship for any of the other children.
If you remove the father, you will end up with the father, mother and all the other children unchanged and the mother with this single child and no spouse. Likewise, if you remove the mother, then the father, mother, and all the other children are unchanged and you will see the father with this single child and no spouse. If you remove the child, you end up with this child having no parents and the rest of the family unchanged.
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@Gordon Collett, yes, that's what the buttons say and what makes sense for what will happen -- but sometimes, it isn't what actually happens.
As @InBudapest says, if you click the pencil next to the child to get to the Parent-Child Relationship popup, and then click the Remove or Replace underneath one of the parents, sometimes, it doesn't just affect that one child. Instead, it does the same thing to all of the children.
Sometimes, that's what you wanted to eventually do anyway, but more often, it emphatically is not what you wanted -- and either way, it's not what you told it to do.
I have not figured out when or why the change of parent up and decides to apply to everyone, but I have definitely experienced it, more than once.
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Really?! I haven’t run into that. I wish there was a way to figure out what triggers that bug. I had assumed that @InBudapest had just used the wrong pencil.
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No, I have never encountered the behaviour reported by Julia, either.
My alternative method of adding children to the correct parents is to copy their IDs below the correct parents (one by one, using the Add Child function), then go back and Remove them (individually) from a relationship with the parents to whom they had been incorrectly associated.
Of course, it is generally more straightforward to undertake the "transfer(s)" by using the pencil icon, then going on to "Replace Parents", as here you also have the option to replace one or both parents. However, occasionally things are not so straightforward - e.g., there might be step / adoptive relationships to one "parent", or perhaps no relationship whatever to one of them. I think that is where I would be inclined to vary my method of changing relationships.
However, if the issue that @InBudapest (and Julia) report is arising on occasions, this does appear to be a bug that the engineers should try to replicate and fix.
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Thank you for the answers.
I have now solved it by adding the child to the proper parents and removing the original, incorrect, parents. Fortunately, this affected only that child, as one would expect.
Next time I encounter a similar issue (i.e. replacing a child's parent through that child's pencil replaces that parent for all siblings), I will try to record the steps I take.
It can be rather frustrating since by trying to fix an error I end up creating more.
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